Slanty Sides Or Die Trying

Geminids of the South : Earth’s annual Geminid meteor shower did not disappoint, peaking before dawn on December 14 as our fair planet plowed through dust from active asteroid 3200 Phaethon. Captured in this southern hemisphere nightscape the meteors stream away from the shower’s radiant in Gemini. To create the image, many individual frames recording meteor streaks were taken over period of 5 hours. In the final composite they were selected and registered against the starry sky above the twin 6.5 meter Magellan telescopes of Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Rigel in Orion, and Sirius shine brightly as the Milky Way stretches toward the zenith. Near Castor and Pollux the twin stars of Gemini, the meteor shower’s radiant is low, close to the horizon. The radiant effect is due to perspective as the parallel meteor tracks appear to converge in the distance. Gemini’s meteors enter Earth’s atmosphere traveling at about 22 kilometers per second. via NASA

js

A Disturbance In The F-Ring

A bright disruption in Saturn’s narrow F ring suggests it may have been disturbed recently. This feature was mostly likely not caused by Pandora (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) which lurks nearby, at lower right. More likely, it was created by the interaction of a small object embedded in the ring itself and material in the core of the ring. Scientists sometimes refer to these features as “jets.”

Because these bodies are small and embedded in the F ring itself, they are difficult to spot at the resolution available to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Instead, their handiwork reveals their presence, and scientists use the Cassini spacecraft to study these stealthy sculptors of the F ring.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 15 above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2016.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. -NASA/JPL-

Image above © NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

On the care and keeping of your scientist

Congratulations on adopting a scientist! Regardless of their field they will require much coffee, free food, and love. Here are some field specific tips for keeping your scientist happy and healthy!

Biology: make sure they don't get overly invested in their model organism by reminding them about the flaws inherent in their system on a regular basis, but also make sure to join in when they criticize other models in favor of their own

Chemistry: don't let them do that 'just one more reaction' at 10 pm. make sure they get out of the lab and see the sun on a regular basis. try to keep them from partying too hard when they do leave the lab

Geology: humor their rock puns but don't let the lick the rocks (they will tell you they need to lick the rocks to identify them, but don't fall for it)

Astronomy: try not to let them become completely nocturnal. point out nice stars to them and look suitably impressed by their "pictures" of planets that don't look like anything to you

Physics: take them to the park on a regular basis to remind them that things larger than subatomic particles exist. bring a frisbee or a ball to play catch with and be impressed by their ability to calculate trajectories

Math: always make sure to have free batteries for their calculators and a mathmatica user guide on hand. Humor them when they tell you why space without angles is important

Ecology: make sure they remember to wear sunscreen and keep an eye on them in the field. Remind them to come inside and analyze their data occasionally

Psychology: don't mention Freud or ever call them a soft or social science, but make sure you gently remind them that social factors can impact reproducibility and try to keep them from drawing sweeping conclusions about the inherent nature of humanity

Neuroscience: be suitably impressed by their newest experiment and then remind them that people are not mice as often as possible

Computer Science: make sure they take breaks while debugging by limiting their supply of coffee. Nod and smile when they go off on indexing and arrays. Make sure they always have a rubber duck.

Make sure to keep your scientist away from engineers unless they have been properly socialized to interact in a translational household. The most important thing is to remember to hug your scientist on a regular basis and remind them that there is life outside the lab

Water Drop on Hydrophobic Sand

Chemist screws up:

Your lungs are now filled with hydrogen cyanide

Babel Tower: A Kinetic Mirrored Ziggurat Reflects the Surrounding Iranian Landscape / By Shirin Abedinirad and Gugo Torelli.

Doing vs. Writing | PHD Comics | http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1887

Reverse psychology that's not in psychology. Reverse biology...?

How did you decide to do a project with RNA?

I was having a conversation with someone in our department about how useful and cheap next-gen sequencing is, and how I was considering spending out my grant on a project looking at immune gene expression in spiders. He told me flat out that I wasn’t capable of doing it, because I wouldn’t understand it enough to ever publish. So I used a kit to extract RNA, sent off the samples, read a few books in the meantime, learned to code, wrote the scripts for R and the supercomputer, then did it. I’m writing it up now, and have found some pretty cool stuff! I’m glad I learned it too, since it’s a good skill to have.

TL;DR: some asshole told me I couldn’t do it, so I decided to do it.

Natural volcanic glass

Locality:

Rother Kopf, Roth, Gerolstein, Eifel, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

Sample of a almost white sandstone xenolith with a gemmy piece of natural blue volcanic glass. Very unique color for natural glass.

Volker Betz’s Photo